


gr'rath's interglactically renowned tailoring shoppe

by livingtheobsessedlife



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Not A Fix-It, Podfic Available, family fic, i miss han solo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 09:54:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14566500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livingtheobsessedlife/pseuds/livingtheobsessedlife
Summary: Gr’rath could fix capes and cloaks of all types- senators and imperialists and renegade criminals alike rushed to Gr’rath with their rips and tears and ill-fitting clothes for her to work her magic on for centuries.The only tear that Gr’rath was never able to fix was the tear that Kylo Ren left slashed through the Solo family.





	gr'rath's interglactically renowned tailoring shoppe

**Author's Note:**

> Podfic available at Gondolinpod’s page!
> 
> ( if it helps, i imagine gr'rath as a sort of mix between yoda and maz, appearance-wise at least )

Gr’rath pushed her coke-bottle glasses up the bridge of her nose, adjusting her vision so that she could see the line of lilac thread before her eyes, her nose very nearly touching the cotton of the purple fabric as she squinted.

“So, Leia,” Gr’rath said, grinning unequivocally, “How’s Han?”

If anybody else had asked, they would have taken Leia’s teeth-exposing smile at face value, but Gr’rath had had experience with imperialist generals, old and new republic senators, and the families of both sides of the war for just over two centuries. She knew a fake smile when she saw one, especially with Leia, who she had known since the formidable General was nothing more than a sticky-handed toddler. Gr’rath raised a single green, worm-shaped eyebrow, glancing suspiciously at Leia as she sewed the next stitch into the fabric, “You sure?”

The long pause that reverberated back from the grand mirror laid out before them was entirely more telling than Leia’s weak shrug.

“Alright, girly,” Gr’rath looked up at Leia’s face, mindlessly positioning herself on one knee so she could pull at the hem of her cape, “Out with it then.”

Leia sighed. Gr’rath had always been better at reading clients than they liked. Two hundred years of tailoring cloaks and capes and cowls and hoods and everything that jedis and senators and imperialists could possibly need really opened one’s eyes to the drama of intergalactic life.

“It’s been a… a couple months since Han has been home.” Leia admitted. Her eyes were anywhere but on that big tripod mirror with its indications in every direction. She glanced to the left, where Gr’rath kept her smorgasbord of fabrics uncontained despite the shelves behind them. To her right stood the small reception area that Gr’rack had set up years ago. Reminders and receipts with names of all sorts scribbled on them in Gr’rath’s peculiar scrawl were spread all across the ancient desk. She briefly distracted herself with the colors and the age of the room around her, it’s comfortingly dim light providing a brief shadow from the truth. Leia’s eyes eventually landed back on the mirror, and she found Gr’rack staring right back at her. 

The stout woman tutted, her tongue clicking against the roof of her mouth in a way that composed an odd, sympathetic sort of countenance with her green skin and the soft wrinkles around her eyes, standing up to look Leia in the eyes. She rubbed a comforting hand along Leia’s outer arm.

“Because of Ben’s running away?”

The face that Leia made was one of the worst, most tortured expressions she had ever seen on a client or a friend, “He goes by Kylo Ren now, I believe.” She looked down at her feet with a pitiful smile, wet and sad and one of the worst things Gr’rack had ever seen- and she once had to tailor formal wear for a moody teenage wookie who had just been broken up with. 

“Oh, I’m so sorry, honey,” Gr’rath said frowning as she gently pulled the cape off of Leia’s shoulders, “Those boys have good heads on their shoulders thanks to you. I’m positive they’ll come around.”

Leia sniffled, staring straight ahead, voice stony and filled with nothing more than a general’s composition, “And if they don’t?”

Gr’rath’s heart broke for this rebel hero before her, for the passionate princess with enough fortitude to fill the sun, who felt the pain of her planet being pulled out of orbit for the second time in her life, only this time the planet was Han and Ben and Luke and everybody who counted and were falling away, burning up in the orbit of time. 

“It’ll be okay,” Gr’rath promised, quietly. She pulled Leia in for a hug as the 40 year old princess stepped off of the pedestal. There were more lines on her face, more worry, more anxiety, more hopelessness in a face intended to be a monolith of hope than there ever had been before. 

Gr’rath repeated her line, “It’ll be okay.”

////////

The day that Han Solo staggered into her little shop, he didn’t have an appointment in her books. She took him in anyway at the drop of a hat (literally- she had been helping out the Twi’lek haberdasher next door whose daughter had gone into labor that morning and Han had surprised her so much that she dropped the hat she was working on). 

He was holding his vest, the one that she tutted at and picked at whenever he came in. It was threadbare and utterly anachronistic, pulled right out of a decade of Han’s youth, and she always urged him to modernize, to wear something different for once, but this time he was holding onto it like it meant the world to him and that letting it fall to pieces would tear him into pieces himself. 

The bell on her door rang when he stepped in, like a raven at night, and his footsteps followed hollowly. She looked up to find him staring, looking lost with that damn vest clutched in his hands like a lifeline, “I didn’t know where else to go,” He said, so broken and un-heroic. It reminded her so painfully of the expression on Leia’s face months earlier when the general had told her of the status of her renegade family. 

Gr’rath didn’t hesitate to usher Han inside, up on the pedestal. It was obvious he had been through a lot. 

The pants he wore were cheap and ill-fitting and probably smuggled off of some alien planet in Han’s trail of mischief. She had his measurements on file, could have just had him hand over the garments in his hands and send him on his way, but she pretended she had lost them sometime as a hostage of war and ushered him to her pedestal.

He was silent for the entire session. When she tried to engage him in small talk, inquire about what he’d been doing, what planets he’d been galavanting about on, even how Chewie was doing, she was greeted with nothing but a dissonant silence. No quips, no smirks, just Han Solo staring back at himself in the mirror of a shadowed tailor’s shop. 

When they were done, she folded the garments over her arm and stared up at him. She’d known Han since he blew up the Death Star the first time. Gr’rath had been the one to design his first set of formals, the ones he wore to receive his first medal by Princess Leia Organa and the rest of the resistance. She had never seen rebel hero Han Solo look more lost. 

“Are you okay, Han?” She asked quietly from behind her desk as she checked him out after carefully placing the flimsy vest on her worktable behind her. 

He looked at nothing but his own hands, down towards the wooden floor of her shop with its creaks and cracks, “What’s the bill, Gr’rath?”

She wanted more than that, wanted to hear more than an empty sigh from somebody she had thought she knew so well, “I know it’s hard, what with what happened to Ben and everything, but-“

He flinched at his son’s name, “The bill?”

“It’s on the House, Han.” She said, and watched him turn around and leave, undoubtedly for another mission far away from rebel commanders and imperialist rising stars and the last Jedi Knight in the galaxy. 

////////

 

Three weeks later, Chewbacca came in to pick up the vest and pants that Han had left with her. 

Gr’rath tried to offer him tea, but he loyally growled and told her that he needed to get back to The Falcon before Han left without him. It sounded like a hopeless apology. 

“Good luck,” She called out after him as he stooped to not hit his head on the door frame, “Tell Han I say hello.”

He growled something abysmal and loud back, but it was in too complex of Shyriiwook for her to comprehend. She was pretty she understood anyway. 

 

She was just as surprised the day that Kylo Ren stepped into her shop as the day his father had. She knew there was some important imperialist on her books, somebody by the name of Hux had scheduled it, but she hadn’t expected him of all people. 

He swept into the single-room shop like he was better than her, like he could destroy the lowly place with a snap of his fingers- which she had heard that he could do now but that was besides the point. He came in flanked by two stormtroopers, masked statues in their own rights. She tried to address them with a gentle smile, but they stood emotionless on either side of the doorway like they were part of the door frame itself, gargoyles cursing those who pass. 

Kylo was wearing that silly mask of his that she’d heard about. It looked even more ridiculous than had been described, but she knew it was him despite it all, knew that the quiet young boy she once knew was buried somewhere in the recesses of the dark cloak that she tugged at. 

He was so painfully silent for the entire session, as if she hadn’t know him since he was the same age as his mother had been when she first came to Gr’rath’s little shop. Gr’rath remembered him as a toddler, shuffling around her shop, quiet as a quiet kid could be, inquisitive and curious, polite, and costumed like some regal version of an adult if it weren’t for the sweet, peach like face that punctuated the heroics of his appearance. It was all so odd, then again, children of heroes always looked odd, misplaced, left behind in the wake of fame. 

That’s not to say that Han and Leia were bad parents, on the contrary. Han and Leia outfitted little Ben with more attention and love than any other parent that ever walked into her shop. But their work was important, arguably just as important as a child in a dangerously new world, harbored by overprotective parents, a hirsute uncle with a vaguely defined language barrier, a plethora of droids ready to serve their masters as if they were still trapped in the metaphor of war, and a spaceship banged up more than nine lives’ worth. 

“So how are you doing, Kylo?” She asked quietly as she marked the length of the cloak’s hem. 

The dark-cloaked man before her grunted, looked defiantly ahead as one of the stormtroopers behind them growled, “Hey! Don’t address the lord without being addressed first.”

Gr’rath huffed, muttered something along the lines of, “Not like His Silentness was going to address me first anytime soon.” She wasn’t sure whether he heard it or not, but she certainly hoped that he did. 

The session continued in utter silence. When she pulled the cloak off his shoulders and ushered him off of the pedestal, he offered her an ungrateful nod and with a stale elegance, marched out of her shop without another word.

She stared after him as the stormtrooper approached her, “We’ll be back in two weeks, m’am,” He said, blaster perched in his hands, “You must have Kylo Ren’s garments completed by then, and it will be without charge as service to your emperor.”

Gr’rath stared back at him impotently. This was the kind of work that typically took three weeks to do. And on the house? She was going to have to work overtime to get it done. She could already feel the ache in her back building in anticipation of the candlelit midnight work. 

She sighed, hustling to the back of her shop where her work table was, already splayed with fabrics and garments for an assortment of characters all across the galaxy. She had work to get to apparently. Gr’rath huffed out a sigh as she pulled out her black thread. She was going to need a lot of it. 

She understood why Leia was upset now. That pseudosith, the child posing in a man’s armor wasn’t Ben Solo. It was Kylo Ren, lost in the depths of black cloaks and a mask of romanticized histories of agony and regality.

////////

 

Clientele was slow one day (because that’s what happens during a war, ill-fitting clothes and a lack of fanfare according to daily garments become the natural precedence) when Gr’rath allowed her mind to wander to the curious status of one Luke Skywalker. She had been fixing up the well-loved cloak of an older man, whose serene countenance had always reminded her of a Jedi (though in reality he was a near-nobody who sold racer parts on the outskirts of the inner rim, just a planet away from being a nobody gambling on a life in the outer rim) when Luke’s face popped into her head.

Once upon a time she had designed and tailored attire for Luke Skywalker just as she had for the rest of the Organa/Solo/Skywalker clan. 

He had always traipsed into her shop after Leia, following after his twin sister like a cheerful little puppy, with a goofy smile on his face and a calming presence. He’d make funny faces behind young Ben in the mirror when the kid was nervous and crack jokes about how royal his sister looked with her new outfits half-done and pinned up at every angle. He used to tell her that she reminded him of the wisest man he ever knew, his old Jedi master, because of her size and color and the way she spoke like the wisdom of the universe was hidden underneath her piles of fabrics and thread and half-finished projects. She would always laugh and tell him he was insane- the Force must’ve been pressing on him too hard or he’d whacked himself with that lightsaber of his or something. 

She had heard he became a recluse after the whole Ben Solo/Kylo Ren debacle, which was just about the dumbest thing she ever heard. Luke Skywalker swearing off jedism? It was moronic. Its very notion was a juxtaposition of epic proportions- like night and day, Luke without faith, Leia without Luke. It looked to Gr’rath almost like the world was falling apart at her feet, that the Force-pulled threads were being tugged from the fabrics of the universe and it’s patchwork of faith and life and love. But she supposed that things happened, that things changed, that Luke probably blamed himself more than anybody else, and she had seen firsthand how the blame had affected Leia. She couldn’t even imagine how it changed Luke. 

At her worktable, with the dim light and her squinted eyes peering over a careful line of thread, Gr’rath counted how many years it had been since she had seen Luke Skywalker in the flesh. She whispered each number aloud to herself, slowly and quietly, as if her lowered volume would summon him back to society like a cursed spell in the candlelight, a broken chance at necromancy and hope. When she finished, she counted again in disbelief.

Gr’rath never did a job for Luke Skywalker again, but her heart mourned for him anyway. He no doubt ended up like his sister. 

////////

A wealthy resistance-supporter was standing on her pedestal one day, the very same pedestal that the wookie, the child, the pair of intergalactic heroes, and the Jedi had all stood on at one point or another, chatting away, when Gr’rath found out the latest tragedy of Han Solo. 

She had wavered in her work when Madame Tareiks had mentioned it, so casually, like a rumor or a parcel of gossip up for grabs by the masses. It really wasn’t, not in Gr’rath’s book.

“Poor Captain Solo,” Madame Tareiks had said, making a ‘tsk tsk’ sound as if her surface sympathy made it all okay. 

Gr’rath had known the infamous Han Solo as more than a hero, more than a symbol of faceless hope. She’d seen him as an ex-con in an entirely new world, as somebody who doubted their best parts and capitalized on what they saw as the worst, as a father, a lover, a laughing face bending underneath a wookie’s arm, a stoic expression staring in her mirror, as a 32 length pant and a 16 inch neck. His tragedy deserved more than a shocked giggle from an affluent oil miner’s wife. But kicking customers out for speaking their mind and trying to share information was generally bad business, so Gr’rath remained quiet, hummed politely in affirmation, and thought of the candid happiness of the Solo-Organa family that once thrived like the unadulterated, fiery core of a billion-year-old planet.

“Do you know what happened?” Gr’rath asked, trying to sound as offhand as possible despite the forlorn frog trapped in her throat.

Tareiks shook her head, “Now that’s just the worst part, isn’t it? His own son killed him. Kylo Ren, y’know? Apparently he stabbed him right through the heart. Awful, isn’t it?”

Gr’rath fought back tears, “Yeah,” She said, “Just awful.”

////////

It was a week later when Princess General Leia Organa Solo appeared at her doorway, despondent and hidden in the rain’s planelike shadow. They were in the middle of a war with Leia at its head, Gr’rath was surprised that Leia was able to be there at all. They stood there, at opposite ends of the shop, staring at each other like there was nothing else they could do. 

Leia was clutching a long piece of fabric that Gr’rath recognized instantly. It had been a gift from her to Leia, a wedding present. Han had one, too, and the pair had worn the specially made capes the day after their wedding with smiling faces and bright futures. Gr’rath had been one of the few people in attendance that day, being one of the few survivors from the couple’s tenuous pasts. 

“I-ripped it,” Leia said, holding the familiar cloak up to show Gr’rath, voice cracking like the weakest slap of thunder that the skies could possibly expel. 

Gr’rath traversed the room slowly, like she was approaching a skittish animal, hurt and untrusting, in the forests of the wild. Leia carefully handed the cloak over to the tailor who examined it and found the most miniscule of tears ripped in a spot that lay right over the breast bone. The fabric was littered with tear-stains and rain splotches in an oddly morbid collage of mourning. Gr’rath stared at the fabric for a long moment. 

“Can you fix it?” Leia asked quietly. Her voice reeked with age and tears. She sounded so old, so unlike the strong general that once lead the rebels to victory and Gr’rath’s heart broke for the millionth time for General Princess Leia.

“Of course I can, dear,” Gr’rath said, a comforting hand resting on Leia’s upper arm. Leia hummed her contentment and automatically shuffled over to the pedestal. She didn’t dare look in the mirror, too terrified of the age and vulnerability and mourning that would echo back at her, just stared at her shoes and tried her damnedest to internalize the shattering fragility. 

Gr’rath worked in silence for the rest of the session. The fix was simple enough, but she wanted to make sure that she got it absolutely perfect, for Leia (and for Han).

There was no sound, not a sniffle or a croak heard through the silence, but Gr’rath could feel the silent sobs wrack through her princess nonetheless. 

When Leia stepped down, her head was bowed toward her feet and her toes, and Gr’rath felt compelled to rub a hand along the princess’s upper arm again in comfort. She muttered the line, much like she did all those years ago when a facade of hope remained in the skies of a painting of the Millenium Falcon and its return, “It’ll be okay.” 

It broke Leia to hear it, to doubt it, because she was a hero and she was strong no matter how much she needed to cry, and her courage could color space like a paint-by-number. 

Gr’rath repeated her line, because Leia needed to hear it almost as much as she needed to hear Han’s voice one last time or hold her son in her arms without fear of the darkness, “It’ll be okay.” Gr’rath repeated, “It’ll be okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> Check me out on tumblr at dammit-stark


End file.
